Above 100NDR diagnostic

For B2B software companies and the investors behind them

Your valuation is priced on net retention. Is anyone managing to it?

Buyers and investors pay for revenue that compounds. Every point of net dollar retention (NDR) moves your ARR multiple, yet your customer success team is probably still measured on calls logged and churn explained. We find what actually drives expansion in your customer base, so you can double down on it.

Get your NDR diagnosticSee what +10 points is worth
The net retention waveEV / ARR by NDR band
Net retention valuation waveARR valuation multiple rises with both ARR growth and net dollar retention. Moving from 100% to 110% NDR at the same sales effort lifts a company from about 7x to about 9.5x ARR.0x2x4x6x8x10x12x14x0%10%20%30%40%50%60%ARR growth →Valuation MultipleNDR %80%90%100%110%120%You today · 7.2x+10 pts NDR · 10.0x
Same sales team, same new-logo growth. Ten more points of NDR pushes you into a higher wave, and a higher multiple. Illustrative model adapted from SEG's Net ARR Retention Wave.

What retention is worth to you

Net retention over 100% is compound interest on your customer base.

You can keep paying for new logos to stay at the same waterline, or you can make the customers you already have worth more every year. Plug in your numbers and see what a few points of NDR does to your enterprise value over five years.

Illustrative model, not investment advice. Calibrated to the examples in SEG's Net ARR Retention Wave.

$5M
100%
40%
If you lifted NDR by
Added ARR in year 5
$11M
Added value at today's 7.2x
$80M
With multiple expansion to 10.0x
$187M

Same sales team. Same new-logo engine. The only change is that your existing customers expand more and leave less.

The gap in your plan

You report NDR to your board every quarter. Who is actually engineering it?

Your sales team has a pipeline, a quota, and a playbook. Your retention, the number your multiple depends on most, usually has a reactive CS team and a health score. The fastest-growing software companies do it differently. They are 3x more likely to treat customer success as the team that discovers what drives customer outcomes, and therefore expansion.

Where you probably are

Churn reporting

  • Your health scores flag customers who are failing, after the fact
  • A drop in logins, a lagging indicator, triggers a last-minute save
  • Your CSMs are graded on calls logged, emails sent, and QBRs completed
  • Your board deck explains why customers churned, not why the best ones grew
Where your multiple wants you to be

Customer science

  • You treat every customer as an experiment
  • You know why some customers get better outcomes, and who gets them most cost-efficiently
  • You transfer winning patterns to the rest of your base
  • Your product, sales, and leadership teams act on the same insights

The 5-minute test

Which bucket do you fall into?

Two questions. Answer them honestly. Your answers stay in your browser and are not stored or sent anywhere.

Question 1

Within 5 minutes, can you tell me which of your customers had more than a 10% increase or decrease in success outcomes on your platform this month vs. last month?

And most importantly, do you know why, with good evidence?

Question 2

Do stakeholders in product, sales, and on the executive team have those same insights?

Answer both questions to see your result.

The method

Outcomes and outcome efficiency matter most.

Most CS playbooks treat health scoring as an activity-tracking alarm system. Our framework diagnoses where customer value comes from. We measure two things, track how they trend, and find the root cause behind every meaningful change.

I.

Total trending outcomes

When a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good measure (Goodhart's Law). If CSMs are graded on activity volume, they work to finish tasks instead of delivering customer value. We base health on Outcome Achievement, which checks whether customers are achieving the business goals they bought your product for.

Portfolio-wide drop
Signals internal product friction, release bugs, or onboarding workflow issues that need Product or RevOps to step in.
Single-account drop
Signals friction on the client side, such as stakeholder turnover, configuration drift, or internal process changes.
II.

Trending outcome efficiency

Efficiency =Total OutcomesTotal Bill

Composite health scores rely heavily on raw usage. Large accounts look healthy because they have many seats, while smaller accounts getting a lot of value per dollar look at risk. Outcome efficiency adjusts for price and shows how much value each account gets for what it pays.

High-efficiency outliers
These customers get the most out of your platform. Their workflows reveal power-user habits you can build into product defaults or use to define the ideal customer profile for Sales.
Low-efficiency outliers
These customers pay too much for the value they get. They are a silent churn or contraction risk, no matter how often they log in.

What you get

Find the growth already sitting in your customer base.

Whether you run the company or hold it in your portfolio, you get an outside view of where your NDR comes from and a short list of moves that lift it.

  • B2B software CEOs and CROs
  • PE operating partners
  • VC portfolio teams

Independent data analysis

We connect your product analytics to your customers’ business results, so you can see which accounts are gaining value, which are quietly losing it, and which features drive expansion. No internal reporting bias.

  • Account-level outcome trends you can act on
  • Your efficiency outliers, both high and low
  • Product-wide vs. single-account root causes

Customer interviews

We talk directly with your customers to learn why some get far better outcomes than others, and what your best accounts do that the rest of your base does not.

  • Evidence behind every trend in your data
  • Power-user workflows you can scale
  • Insights your product, sales, and board can use

What changes for you

Move from bailing water to riding the wave.

Two companies can grow ARR at the same rate and be worth very different amounts. One is replacing leaking revenue. The other is compounding it. When you know why your customers succeed, you become the second one.

  • NDR over 100%

    Your customers who get real outcomes expand. The ones overpaying for value get caught before they quietly downgrade.

  • A higher multiple

    You walk into your next raise or exit with retention that compounds, and a clear story about why it will keep compounding.

  • Cheaper growth

    Feature adoption rises and your best customers refer others, so you need fewer new logos to hit the same plan.

Field notes

Find what drives success. Then double down on it.

Every engagement starts with a hypothesis about why customers succeed and ends with a change the whole company can act on.

  • Case 014

    Ledgerline

    Series C · Finance automation

    Net dollar retention

    From 94%to 118%

    What we found
    Customers who switched on automated reconciliation in their first 60 days closed their books 4 days faster and expanded at 3x the rate of everyone else.
    What they did
    Moved reconciliation setup into onboarding week one and rebuilt the CSM playbook around it.
    “We had been celebrating logins. They showed us the one feature that actually made our customers money. We doubled down on it, and NDR went from leaking to compounding in three quarters.”
    Priya Natarajan, Chief Customer Officer, Ledgerline

  • Case 021

    Fleetwise

    PE-backed · Logistics software

    Gross churn

    From 19%to 7%

    What we found
    Route optimization usage was flat in aggregate, but fuel savings per truck had dropped across the whole base after a map data change.
    What they did
    Fixed the data issue, then reported fuel savings to every customer every month.
    “Our health scores were green while customers were quietly getting less value. The outcome trend made the problem obvious. We fixed it before renewal season, not after.”
    Marcus Oyelaran, Operating Partner, Fleetwise

  • Case 033

    Shiftbase

    Series B · Workforce management

    New feature adoption

    From 22%to 61%

    What we found
    The top tenth of accounts by outcome efficiency all used shift-swap together with the overtime alerts. Nobody else knew the pairing mattered.
    What they did
    Packaged the two as a single workflow and led every QBR with the overtime hours saved.
    “Interviews with our best customers told us something no dashboard could. Our referral pipeline now comes from the exact accounts we used to think were average.”
    Elena Brandt, VP Customer Success, Shiftbase

If it's worth this much, why aren't you doing it?

It's hard, and urgent work wins.

You don't need another dashboard. You need an outside team that does the analysis, talks to your customers, and hands you the moves that lift retention, so customer success becomes the engine behind your multiple instead of a cost center.

  1. Barrier 1

    Your data lives in different places

    Login counts and ticket volume are easy to pull. Seeing whether your customers actually save time, make money, or hit their goals means connecting your product analytics to their business results. Most teams never build that connection.

  2. Barrier 2

    Renewal fires crowd out the real work

    When retention is under pressure, your CS team gets pulled into saving this quarter’s renewals. Nobody has time to study why your best customers expand, so the same problems repeat next quarter.

Start with an NDR diagnostic

Find out which wave you're on, and what it takes to reach the next one.

Whether you're preparing for a raise or exit, or you're an investor trying to lift value across your portfolio, you'll leave with a clear view of what drives your net retention and where your biggest expansion opportunities are.